One day nearly 20 years ago, Stephen Bassett
realized UFO abductees needed a lobbyist.
He had spent four months working for the Program for
Extraordinary Experience Research out of a modest townhouse in
Cambridge, Mass., when he had the epiphany: He could continue
his research with John Mack, the leading authority on the alien
abductions, for the rest of his life — but it would never make a
difference.
“It occurred to me that it wasn’t a scientific problem, but a
political one,” he said. They could pile evidence of
extraterrestrial encounters from the White House lawn to the
moon, and no one would pay it any mind. What the issue needed
was someone who could get the powers that be to listen.
The alien issue was really heating up in 1996, what with the
summer blockbuster “Independence Day,” and Bassett worried
someone else would get the same idea. So he quit his volunteer
gig, piled his belongings atop his beat-up Mazda RX-7 and drove
off to Washington.
“I get down there, and I file” the lobbyist papers, he recalled.
“I’m the first one. Nineteen years later, I’m still the only
one. I could have taken my time.”
Bassett, a balding man with expressive eyes that seem to go from
blue to green, has long had one goal: Get the government to
admit that it has been covering up proof of alien visits. It has
been a lonely battle, but he is convinced that the stars have
finally aligned for his convoluted theory, which involves the
Clintons, their longtime adviser John Podesta and a now-deceased
billionaire.
“I want to see disclosure by the New Hampshire primary,” he said
brushing crumbs off his black dress shirt and purple tie during
lunch at the National Press Club this month. “And I can make the
case that it’s going to happen.”
Bassett was born in 1946 to a military family that moved all
over the country. He read science fiction, built model planes
and enjoyed the cheap bowling and milkshakes on the bases. His
father rarely spoke to him and fought constantly with his
mother. And Bassett struggled with obsessive-compulsive
tendencies.
He entered Georgia Tech just as the United States was going to
war in Vietnam. Although he was able to avoid the draft, the
conflict darkened his worldview. There were too many secrets
being kept, he felt; his country seemed on a path to disaster.
After college, he spent a couple of aimless decades freelancing
as a tennis pro and business consultant, subsidized by an
inheritance from his father. Then, a book changed his life.
It was called “Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens,” and
unlike other literature on the subject, it was written by an
acclaimed scholar: Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist with a Pulitzer
Prize for biography under his belt. Mack, who died in 2004,
began his research as a skeptic, interviewing dozens of subjects
that he at first assumed suffered from mental illness. In the
end, he wasn’t so sure.
“Yes, I take these people’s stories seriously,” Mack told the
Chicago Tribune in 1994. “Yes, I think that they are telling the
truth.’’
Bassett, the former sci-fi geek without a sense of place in the
world, finally found something he could dedicate himself to.
In 1961, the astronomer Frank Drake came up with an equation to
estimate the abundance of communicative alien civilizations.
“It’s 10,000 that we can detect,” he told The Washington Post
earlier this year, but “there are a lot more.”
Considering the vastness of the universe, it’s not crazy to
imagine that someone’s out there. One theory why we haven’t
encountered anyone: Perhaps all advanced civilizations are
doomed to come up with a technology that destroys them before
they get a chance to come calling.
That’s a pretty bleak scenario. It’s no wonder that many
earthlings cleave to a more optimistic theory — that alien
visits have happened, but the government conspired to cover them
up. According to a poll published by the Huffington Post earlier
this year, about half of Americans believe in some kind of alien
life, and a quarter think visitors have come to Earth.
Yet getting appointments on Capitol Hill wasn’t easy for an
advocate who believed that aliens landed at Roswell in 1947 and
that the nation’s leaders created a “Truth Embargo” to keep
information from getting out.
“Nobody there wanted to touch it,” Bassett said.
In 2013, unable to get anything close to a real congressional
hearing, he created a fake one. With a $1 million donation from
a Canadian believer, Bassett paid former members of Congress
such as Alaskan senator Mike Gravel and Maryland representative
Roscoe Bartlett $20,000 to spend a week at the National Press
Club listening to testimony about UFOs.
The hours of testimony — from former Air Force officials who
believe they saw spacecraft, or accounts of animals found
dissected in pastures — led to some lighthearted stories but no
movement with any current members of Congress. Then came the
tweet heard round the world.
The message came from Podesta, the former top aide in Bill
Clinton’s White House, as he stepped down after 11 months as
special adviser for President Obama.
“My biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the
#disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisstilloutthere,” he
tweeted on Feb. 13.
It was retweeted thousands of times and picked up by mainstream
media reporters across the country — most presenting it as a
joke. But to Bassett and fellow believers, this didn’t read like
a bit of ironic Twitter humor. This was big.
Podesta, in fact, is probably the closest thing to an ally this
issue has. He’s an “X-Files” fan who has called for greater
transparency on UFO-related issues, and he wrote the foreword to
a best-selling book titled “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and
Government Officials Go on the Record.” In it, he wrote: “It’s
time to find out what the truth really is that’s out there.”
The fact that Podesta was moving on to chair the Hillary Clinton
presidential campaign had folks like Bassett buzzing.
“You don’t just send that out,” Bassett said. “It means
something.”
By Bassett’s telling, the Clintons have been deep into the UFO
issue since 1993, when billionaire Laurance Rockefeller —
Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller’s grandson — began
lobbying them to release all information about extraterrestrials
they had.
For three years, Rockefeller corresponded and met with members
of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy,
according to the results of a Freedom of Information Act request
filed by Grant Cameron, a Canadian researcher. In 1995, Hillary
Clinton met with Rockefeller at his ranch; a memo from the
office’s then-director, John H. Gibbons, alerted her that
Rockefeller would “want to talk with you about his interest in
extrasensory perception, paranormal phenomena, and UFOs.”
“They were engaging with the ET issue at the behest of a
billionaire, and there was no coverage,” Bassett said.
Still, how does any of this suggest that the government is going
to open its supposed alien-visit files before the New Hampshire
primary?
“I believe Clinton’s team has calculated that they cannot make
it out of the election without first dealing with the ET issue,”
he said. “But what are her options? If she calls a press
conference and gives it too much gravitas, she’ll still have to
deal with the fundamental question of why she hasn’t talked
about it in the last 23 years. The alternative is to trigger the
press to ask her about it. . . . Then she can measure exactly
the amount of gravitas she wants to give it.”
The tweet, Bassett believes, was intended as the bait for the
media.
One small problem with the theory: Both the Clinton campaign and
Podesta’s office refused to comment for this story.
Okay, let’s be real. Few people are going to take Bassett
seriously.
“He makes statements that are completely unprovable and put him
on the fringe,” said Leslie Kean, who wrote the UFO book that
Podesta contributed to.
Yes, there have been unexplainable phenomena in the sky, she
said, and sure, the government should investigate. But to claim
that aliens have interacted with people just hurts the cause.
“His ideas are silly and makes it harder for serious people to
make progress,” she said.
Even Bassett’s closest supporters express doubt about how close
we are to the truth.
“He’s one of the most overly optimistic people I’ve ever met,”
said Joseph Buchman, a fellow true believer. “I find that
endearing, but I don’t know if it’s quite as close to happening
as he thinks it is.”
Bassett has sacrificed a lot for what he calls the “least-funded
advocacy group in history.” (He says he gets about $15,000 to
$20,000 in donations per year.) He often crashes on supporters’
couches. He has little time for a social life.
“It would be nice to have a mate, someone to share this with, or
a kid that could likely go to the stars,” he said. “But that
ship has sailed.”
It may seem like a strange cause to give your life to. But
Bassett sees a larger mission. Unveiling the truth about aliens
is really just the start.
“Once that is pulled down, you will see a shift in focus from
the world,” he says. “More transparency, more communication
among countries, an age of reform.”
If only the people of Earth realize there’s something out there
greater than us, he said, perhaps then we can set aside the
petty differences that are poised to destroy us.
Lots of people pray for world peace. Is it so strange for
Bassett to seek help from above? |
